Porous Wholes, or the Cellular Imagination in Desert Painting
- Jan 13
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 14
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
The perception of Aboriginal Australian desert painting as evocative of cellular life, membranes, nuclei, organelles, and metabolic flows has emerged repeatedly among contemporary viewers shaped by biological and systems-oriented modes of thought. Such associations often provoke unease within academic interpretation, as they appear to risk anachronism or cultural projection. Yet the persistence and coherence of these perceptions suggest that they warrant serious theoretical consideration. Rather than dismissing them as misreadings, we can argue that the resonance between desert painting and cellular imagery can be understood as a convergence at the level of archetypal form. A Jungian and post-Jungian framework allows this convergence to be articulated without reducing Indigenous epistemologies to Western scientific metaphors, situating both within a deeper field of symbolic organization that precedes and exceeds modern conceptual distinctions.
Aboriginal desert paintings, particularly those emerging from Central and Western Desert contexts in the late twentieth century, are grounded in an ontology in which land, life, and story are inseparable. As anthropologists and art historians have extensively documented, these works encode ancestral narratives, kinship relations, and ecological knowledge through visual systems that do not aim at naturalistic representation.[1,2] The dot, the concentric circle, and the sinuous line function not as decorative motifs but as elements of a topological language through which Country is rendered as alive, sentient, and internally differentiated. Waterholes, ancestral beings, human bodies, and paths of movement exist in mutual implication, resisting the modern Western separation between organism and environment. Within this worldview, land is not a passive substrate but an active participant in social and cosmological life.
It is precisely this emphasis on living relationality that invites comparison with biological systems, even though no such comparison is present within Indigenous explanatory frameworks themselves. The question, then, is not whether these paintings depict cells (they do not!) but why their formal organization so readily invites cellular perception among contemporary viewers. Analytical psychology offers a way to approach this question without collapsing cultural difference into universal sameness. For Jung, archetypes are not inherited images but structural tendencies of the psyche that shape perception, imagination, and symbolic expression.[3] They manifest across cultures in recurring forms, centers, boundaries, rhythms, and fields, without fixing those forms to a single meaning.
Within this framework, the repeated emergence of nested circles, permeable boundaries, and distributed multiplicity in desert painting can be understood as expressions of archetypal organization rather than symbolic representations of specific objects. Jung repeatedly emphasized that symbols anticipate concepts, the psyche images patterns of life long before those patterns are formalized in scientific language. From this perspective, modern cellular biology does not explain these images retroactively but instead names, at a different epistemic level, structures that human imagination has long been capable of apprehending symbolically.
The frequent identification of membranes within desert painting is particularly instructive. In biology, membranes are neither absolute barriers nor passive borders, they are sites of regulation, exchange, and transformation. Psychologically, membranes correspond to ego boundaries, the interfaces between conscious and unconscious, self and world. Jung understood psychic health not as rigid separation but as the capacity for regulated permeability, a condition he described through the notion of participation mystique, in which differentiation and connection coexist. The visual logic of desert painting repeatedly enacts this condition, forms are distinct yet interpenetrating, bounded yet open, singular yet embedded within larger fields. Such imagery resists the modern impulse toward atomization, instead presenting life as a continuous process of relational becoming.
Post-Jungian thinkers have extended this insight while explicitly resisting reductive interpretation. James Hillman, in particular, rejected the idea that images should be translated into conceptual equivalents, whether mythological or scientific. For Hillman (1975), images are themselves modes of thought, irreducible to what they might be said to represent.[4] From this standpoint, the apparent cellularity of desert painting does not indicate an encoded meaning to be deciphered but rather a shared morphogenetic logic between image and life. The painting does not symbolize biological organization, it thinks biologically in the sense that it enacts the same principles of differentiation, repetition, and relation that characterize living systems.
This shift from representation to process aligns closely with developments in ecopsychology and systems theory, which have increasingly challenged the localization of mind within the individual human subject. Ecopsychological theorists argue that psyche is distributed across ecological relationships and that symbolic life cannot be understood apart from the environments in which it unfolds.[5] Indigenous Australian cosmology has long operated within such a distributed model. Country remembers, responds, and communicates, knowledge is held not solely in human minds but in landforms, stories, and ceremonial practices. The visual language of desert painting, with its non-hierarchical fields and absence of a single privileged viewpoint, mirrors this distributed cognition in ways that resonate strongly with contemporary understandings of complex biological systems.
The structural parallels between desert painting and cellular imagery are therefore best understood as instances of formal resonance rather than representational overlap. Dot fields recall populations of cells or molecules not because they depict them, but because both articulate multiplicity without fragmentation. Concentric circles function as centers of activity, whether understood as waterholes, ancestral sites, or nuclei. Interconnecting lines evoke pathways of movement and exchange, analogous to metabolic or signaling networks. These correspondences emerge because both domains address the same fundamental question, how does life maintain coherence while remaining open to transformation?
At the same time, it is essential to maintain a clear ethical distinction between Indigenous meaning-making and contemporary viewer response. To claim that desert paintings are “about” cells risks epistemic colonization, subordinating Indigenous cosmology to Western scientific frameworks. A Jungian approach, properly applied, avoids this by locating the cellular reading within the psyche of the modern observer rather than the intention of the Indigenous artist. The resonance tells us something about the archetypal depth of the image and the symbolic poverty of modern scientific culture, which often encounters living form only through abstraction and instrumentation.
Jung argued that modernity suffers from a dangerous dissociation between rational knowledge and symbolic understanding. Scientific concepts, while powerful, become psychologically sterile when cut off from imaginal life. Images that can be apprehended simultaneously through ancestral cosmology and modern biology function as bridges across this divide. They remind viewers that scientific knowledge does not emerge ex nihilo but crystallizes from deeper patterns of perception and imagination. Desert paintings, in this sense, operate as sites of epistemic convergence without resolving their tensions. They tolerate multiple readings without collapsing into any one of them.
The viewer who perceives cells in such a painting is not uncovering a hidden meaning but participating in an archetypal dialogue between image and life. This participation does not diminish the painting’s Indigenous specificity, rather, it testifies to its symbolic vitality. Only images with sufficient archetypal density can sustain such cross-domain intelligibility without exhaustion. Far from being an error, the cellular association is a symptom of the painting’s capacity to think life at a level deeper than conceptual taxonomy.
In the end, the question is not whether Aboriginal desert paintings can be read through a Jungian or biological lens, but how such readings are held. When approached as symbolic resonances rather than explanatory reductions, they reveal the persistence of archetypal form across radically different knowledge systems. They show that modern biology and ancestral cosmology are not opposites but divergent articulations of a shared encounter with living organization. In attending carefully to this encounter, one may glimpse a mode of understanding in which psyche, land, and life are no longer split into separate domains, but recognized as mutually informing expressions of a single, dynamic reality.
Read more from Dragana Favre
Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, EMDR, and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslav roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
References:
[1] Morphy, H. (1998). Aboriginal art. Phaidon Press.
[2] Myers, F. R. (2002). Painting culture: The making of an Aboriginal high art. Duke University Press.
[3] Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)
[4] Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. Harper & Row.
[5] Fisher, A. (2013). Radical ecopsychology: Psychology in the service of life. SUNY Press.
Painting: Collaborative APY Lands artists, Ngamampa Ngura / Note Plays, 2018, acrylic on canvas; courtesy Fondation Opale, Collection Bérengère Primat. Exhibition “Elles”, Musée Rath, geneva, Switzerland
